The Status of the Dream

by Allister Sparks

Taking the oath of office, May 10, 1994

Nelson Mandela is soon to leave office after five history-making years as president of . The magnitude of the challenges his government faced—and of the progress it made—is only now becoming clear, for South Africa has been in the throes of three revolutions at once.

66 WQ Spring 1999 The inaugural scene. “It is not the kings and generals that make history, but the masses of the people,” Mandela once said.

he inauguration of President on May 10, 1994, was the most stirring experience of my life. After more than 40 years of writing against , of exposing its iniquities and cruelties and the sheer lunacy of it, here at last was a kind of vindi- cation, a kind of triumph. More than that, for the first time I felt the stirrings of a sense of national identification. It is a terrible thing to feel alienated from one’s own peo- Tple, and that I had felt my whole life. In my first book, published a decade ago, I had written that although I was a fifth-generation white South African, I felt myself to be “emotionally stateless”: I could not identify with the land of my birth because it stood for things I abhorred; I felt no sense of pride when I heard my national anthem or saw my national flag. Now here, in the grand amphitheater of Pretoria’s , stood the tall, frail figure of Nelson Mandela, the miracle man, the liv-

South Africa 67 emerged like a butterfly from With the country’s second its cocoon into the sunlight of post-apartheid election due in international acceptance. The Old Man stepped for- June, there are some in South ward and the great crowd hushed. Tall and thin and still, Africa, on both left and right, with that immobile face, so like his own wax likeness in who are writing Mandela’s Madame Tussaud’s, with not a muscle moving, not a flicker of covenant off as a failure. emotion, until after the oath— and then the smile that every- one has come to know, broad, beaming, radiant. Then back ing martyr who had withstood 27 years of into its immobile mode once more for the incarceration by one of the world’s most speech. A speech that seemed aimed at all heartless regimes, taking the oath of office. It the alienated souls of ’s beloved was a clear, cloudless day, the bright-brittle country. The closing words, slow and mea- sunlight crisp in the thin, high-veldt air, with sured, booming out across the great crowd: just the first chill touches of the Southern “We enter into a covenant that we shall build Hemisphere autumn. But from the crowd a society in which all South Africans, both there throbbed an exuberant warmth. A hun- black and white, will be able to walk tall, dred thousand people thronged the lower without any fear in their hearts, assured of slopes of the hillside that sweeps gently down their inalienable right to human dignity—a from the Union Buildings into the city, rainbow nation at peace with itself and the dressed in everything from rags to work world.” And then the pledge, from a man clothes to tribal skins and feathers, come to who had once told the judge who was about see their hero take power from the oppres- to sentence him to life imprisonment that he sors. And up here in the amphitheater, in all was prepared to die for the cause of non- its finery, stood a multinational crowd of racialism. “Never, never, never again shall it extraordinary sartorial and political variety. be that this beautiful land will again experi- ence the oppression of one by another, and had been to only one presidential inau- suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the guration before, a thin and soulless world.” Iaffair at which the tough militarist A military band began playing the lilting Pieter W. Botha was installed in the presence harmony of the new national anthem, of just one foreign leader—the Angolan “Nkosi sikelel iAfrika” (God bless Africa), rebel, Jonas Savimbi. Now, the whole world and I felt the hairs stand up on the nape of was here: Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and my neck. My first experience in all my three Fidel Castro, John Major and Yasir Arafat, score years of a sentiment that was, what, the kings of Belgium and Greece, Swaziland patriotism? Six jet fighters, which only a few and Lesotho, the Duke of Edinburgh and short years before had been strafing the lord chamberlain to King Hussein of Mandela’s men in the bush of , flew Jordan, Israelis and Arabs, Iranians and Turks low overhead trailing long smoke streamers and Greeks and Russians, Europeans and in the colors of the new national flag, fol- Asians and Latin Americans, and, of course, lowed by six helicopter gunships flying the the whole of Africa. The pariah state had flag itself. Down below, a jazz band struck

> Allister Sparks has covered his country as a print and broadcast journalist for 47 years. He was editor of the Rand Daily Mail in the 1970s, reported for and Britain’s Observer in the 1980s, and most recently has been editor of television news for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. He is the author of two best-selling books about South Africa, The Mind of South Africa (1990) and Tomorrow is Another Country (1995). Copyright © 1999 by Allister Sparks.

68 WQ Spring 1999 up. The great crowd burst into song, swaying and jiv- ing to the music and form- ing snakelike trains that wove through the crowds holding the new flag high in the air. The occasion turned, as is wont to happen in Africa, from formal cere- monialism into an im- promptu music festival. A rainbow nation. What a wonderful promise in a world riven by ethnic con- flicts. What a stunning turn- around for a country bedev- iled by half a century of institutionalized racism. Gripped by the symbolism of it, Archbishop , the Nobel laureate, was moved to predict that South Africa, with its own intersection of First and Third World populations, would transform itself from global pariah into global role model. “Once we have got it right,” Tutu said, “South Africa will be the paradigm for the rest of the world.” A squatter camp in the shadow of the Johannesburg skyline is a But promises are one reminder of the continuing poverty of many South Africans. thing, fulfilling them anoth- er. Today, five years later and with the Mandela presidency drawing to year-old president’s covenant off as a fail- a close, is the rainbow nation becoming a ure. With unemployment rising and the reality? Can South Africa, with its long histo- wealth gap between whites and blacks still ry of racial intolerance, really buck the glob- painfully wide, it is easy to find disen- al trend and become a truly nonracial, mul- chanted blacks who will tell you that tiparty democracy? Is nonracialism itself in Mandela has done too much to appease any event not a pipe dream that ignores the the whites and that for them “nothing has hard realities of human nature? Is democra- changed.” Many are irked, too, by what cy not something that can exist in only a they see as an unrepentant attitude among handful of developed countries with a high whites and a resentful reluctance to have degree of homogeneity and what the social any of the social and economic privileges scientists call social balance? they acquired under apartheid diminished. “Take note that we blacks are terminally ith the South Africa’s second fed up,” fumed columnist Jon Qwelane in postapartheid election due a recent article. Won June 2, there are some, on Sadly, an opposite criticism comes from both left and right, who are writing the 80- the Democratic Party (DP), residual home

South Africa 69 plan showing how they intend to advance blacks in their work force and then to sub- mit annual progress reports to the govern- ment, the DP pam- phlet complained that this measure has effec- tively reintroduced a system of racial classifi- cation and criminal- ized “color-blindness.” Somewhat extravagant- ly, it warned that “racial legislation is a very slip- pery slope: apartheid, American segregation, and Nazi Germany all had small beginnings.” The ’ Na- tional Party—now renamed the New National Party (NNP) in a half-hearted at- tempt to distance itself from its past—has simi- larly labeled affirmative action racist, but its words have a hollow ring. Meanwhile, John The case of the Sharpeville Six, black activists who were convicted of a polit- Pilger, a left-wing ical killing, was one of many rallying points in the last years of apartheid. Australian journalist The apartheid government eventually commuted their sentences. who was banned from the country for 30 years, has returned to of white liberalism and a party with a brave make a television documentary called anti-apartheid record. In February 1998, Apartheid did not Die, the central theme the party brought out a stinging pamphlet of which is that Mandela’s African called The Death of the Rainbow Nation, National Congress (ANC) has sold out to in which it accused the Mandela govern- big business and embarked on policies that ment of “a creeping reintroduction of race leave the misery of the black masses policies” under the guise of “corrective untouched. On the right, Lester Venter, a action” to redress the cumulative disadvan- former political correspondent of the tages suffered by blacks under apartheid. South African Broadcasting Corporation, There was more. The government had has published a book called When polarized the political debate by accusing Mandela Goes, predicting a future of predominantly white opposition parties, increasing disarray that leads the unhappy including the DP, of sabotaging transfor- black masses to oust the ANC and vote in mation. Noting that a new affirmative a new socialist workers party in 2004, with action law requires employers to draft a disastrous results.

70 WQ Spring 1999 Of course, South Africa has never tries, meanwhile, have mostly been lacked for doomsday prophets. Even at the geared toward import substitution. Only a time of the 1994 election, many interna- few, notably Rothmans, a major tobacco tional journalists arrived with their video transnational; South African Breweries, cameras primed for a bloodbath, and which is the world’s fourth-largest beer when it didn’t happen, they packed up and manufacturer; and the country’s highly flew to Rwanda, where conveniently there rated wine and fruit-canning enterprises, was one. But what is even more responsi- have been significant exporters. At the ble for the excessively gloomy assessments same time, the new government is with- is a gross underestimation of the task that drawing the fat agricultural subsidies the has confronted the new majority govern- apartheid regime paid to its white farming ment over these past four-and-a-half years. constituents, many of whom are now suc- It has been infinitely more complex and cumbing to the hard realities of a climate difficult than anyone imagined. South that is arid in many regions. Africa is not simply undertaking a sociopo- litical revolution, working to democratize hat compounds the difficulty the modern world’s most deeply is a crippling conflict be- entrenched system of institutionalized Wtween the requirements of racism and political authoritarianism, these simultaneous revolutions. On the daunting though that is in itself. It is one hand, the ANC faces the political attempting three simultaneous revolutions imperative of having to deliver more jobs rolled into one. and better pay to its expectant and long- deprived constituencies. On the other ven as it tackles the task of trying hand, the harsh reality of competitive par- to integrate a society divided by ticipation in the global market is that it Eseveral hundred years of white leads to increased unemployment and domination and 45 years of apartheid ide- pressure on wages, at least in the short ology, the new government must also term. In seeking to transform South Africa undertake a gigantic economic revolu- from producer of primary goods to manu- tion. It has been seeking to transform facturing exporter, the government has to South Africa from an isolationist siege deal with the fact that the old economy economy into a player in the new global required an abundance of cheap, market—a task that has destabilized a unskilled labor, while the new one re- whole chain of emerging economies, quires a smaller but highly skilled work from Russia and Malaysia in the east to force—and the apartheid regime, as a mat- Brazil in the west. ter of policy, prevented the black popula- At the same time, South Africa is hav- tion from acquiring skills. The purpose of ing to move urgently from an economy the policy was not only to protect white based on agriculture and mining to one jobs but to attempt the Sysyphean task of based on exports of manufactured goods. reversing the relentless influx of rural This is the third revolution. The country’s black people to the cities. They were sup- gold resources, once the richest in the world, are dwindling, and the price of gold Black people were deliberately is falling. In 1980, one-sixth of South given a separate and inferior edu- Africa’s total econom- cation, barred from the major uni- ic output was from gold; today it is a pal- versities, and prohibited by law try three percent. South Africa’s indus- from doing skilled work.

South Africa 71 posed to stay in their own little tribal everywhere, particularly in the big cities, “homelands,” which were one day sup- and most especially in the one where I posed to become independent, leaving the have lived for the past 40 years. greater part of the country as the white man’s land. arrived in Johannesburg in February The result was that black people were 1959, and immediately found myself deliberately given a separate and inferior Iboth repelled and fascinated by the education (most, in fact, got no educa- curious mix of vitality and tension that tion at all). They were barred from the seemed to permeate the atmosphere of major universities. They were prohibited this extraordinary city. For Johannesburg by law from doing skilled work. Until was then, and still is, the cutting edge of 1979 they were not allowed to join trade the country’s racial and cultural interac- unions, so they could not acquire skills tions, the place where its First and Third by becoming apprentices. They were not World elements are drawn together by the allowed to form partnerships or compa- irresistible magnet of a dynamic econo- nies. They could not establish business- my. I had grown up on a farm in the back- es, except simple shops selling perish- waters of the Eastern Cape Province, able produce—and even then their trad- alongside the country’s largest black ing licenses had to be renewed annually. reserve, where I had come to know tribal It must be the only instance in history in people in all their slow and amiable ways. which a government deliberately crip- Now I was in the big city, where the black pled the skills base of its country’s work- folk were sharp and streetwise and the ing class. , the trade whites brash and on the make. Though I union leader who became the ANC’s had spent time in London, working for chief constitutional negotiator and is the big news agency on Fleet now a tycoon, has described this planned Street, this was different, with none of neglect as the worst of all apartheid’s Europe’s assured maturity and depth of crimes against humanity. Its legacy is culture and courtesy. I found it frighten- now the new democratic regime’s great- ing but also fascinating, for I realized est liability. from the start that it was a place of primal Seen in that daunting context, as well issues and moral challenges, a place to as the short space of time—there have engage the passions like no other on been not yet 2,000 days to turn around earth. If I wished to understand my coun- the cumulative inequalities of more than try, this was where to do it. 300 years—the criticisms of the new Quickly I came to realize that the democratic regime look either self-serv- essential character of Johannesburg ing or downright malicious. Certainly stemmed from the fact that it was really the charge that “nothing has changed” is an overgrown mining camp. It had that nonsense. Radical change is visible instant and transient air about it, as though every- one had come there for a Johannesburg was then, and still is, quick buck and nothing was the cutting edge of the country’s meant to last. The city had racial and cultural interactions, the sprung into life only 68 years place where its First and Third World before, scarcely elements are drawn together by the six months af- ter a penniless irresistible magnet of a dynamic economy. gold prospector

72 WQ Spring 1999 stumbled upon a rocky outcrop that 1960, the “winds of change” were begin- proved to be the signpost to the world’s ning to blow through the continent. In the richest gold deposits. Because the gold black population a new assertiveness was was deep underground and expensive to stirring. But in South Africa a new prime mine, an elaborate financial structure minister, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, had taken soon followed. It took less than a year to power and was beginning to elaborate the establish the city’s first stock exchange. apartheid ideology and implement it with Brothels and bars arrived almost simulta- intensified thoroughness. Every day neously. The boom was so headlong that brought news of more forced removals as no one bothered to record which official, the bulldozers flattened black residential speculator, or digger had been honored in areas deemed too close to the “white” city, the city’s name. It thus became the city of leaving their residents to be dumped on a the unknown Johannes. stretch of open veldt a sanitary distance The city still had a honky-tonk atmos- away in a new conglomerate to be called phere when I arrived, an impression South Western Townships—. accentuated by the yellow mine dumps and ungainly mine headgears that dot- ted its periphery. Somehow the city seemed a lot bigger than it really was, partly because of its pace and partly because its black population, number- ing two-thirds of the total, lived beyond its fringes in dormitory townships and thronged its streets by day. It was regarded as a skyscraper city, even though its tallest building, House, was only 12 floors high. But the paradox was that unlike every other metropolis in the world, this one died at night. At 5 p.m., “A busy, eager, restless, pleasure-loving town,” as one visitor wrote in 1897, Johannesburg was when businesses closed, the inhabi- built on grueling labor in the gold mines. tants fled to their segmented ghet- tos, the blacks to their dormitory townships and the whites to their high- So the great multiracial metropolis was walled suburban homes. The central city being segmented into a series of self-con- streets fell silent, dark, and sinister. tained, inward-looking ethnic enclaves. I had come there to work as a copyeditor But the African independence movement on the country’s biggest morning newspa- was pumping adrenaline into the young per, the Rand Daily Mail, which under a black intelligentsia, who were churning new editor was showing signs of becoming out books, poetry, and powerful pieces of the first crusading paper for racial justice in protest theater. Many were journalists South Africa’s history. It was a challenging working for a black publishing house run time for such a venture. African colonies by the disowned son of a pioneer mining were reaching for their independence, and magnate. The publishing house was just as British prime minister Harold Macmillan two blocks from the Rand Daily Mail warned during a visit to South Africa in offices, and some of us would meet up

South Africa 73 ing the 1930s, and he brought a chilling intellectualism to the crude racism that had propelled the Afrikaner National Party to power in 1948. Ethnicity, he explained with paternalistic patience, was the way of human nature, and any attempt to create a multiracial nation was not only fallacious but deadly dan- gerous. Apartheid, by contrast, was the way of liberation: each ethnic “nation” had a God-given right to its own identity and its own country, and so the white South Africans were prepared to give each black nation its own homeland even as Prime Minister in 1960 they claimed their own for them- selves. It sounded so plausible in that isolated, all-white chamber, cut with the black journalists at a drinking off like an ocean liner from the pulsating establishment known simply as Whitey’s polyglot reality of the society outside. The Place. It was illegal for blacks to enter bars packed ranks of Verwoerd’s party supporters, or to buy or consume “white” liquor, even hugely dominant in that Parliament and beer, but speakeasies like Whitey’s, called becoming more so with every election, sat in shebeens, flourished everywhere and fascinated silence as they listened to him give became the network for a whole subcul- this veneer of respectability to their bucolic ture of black social life and interracial prejudices. Outside the bulldozers crunched bonding. The shebeen queen who ran the on, the tensions rose, and the ANC was out- joint paid the local police protection lawed. money, inflating the prices, but the clien- tele paid up cheerfully. here followed the bleakest of They were raucous, racy places, some- times. Verwoerd was assassinated times violent, and it was here that I came to Tin 1966, stabbed to death spec- know a whole generation of black journalists, tacularly in his seat of power by a deranged writers, and artists, many of whom were white parliamentary messenger. His police doomed to die early, rot in jail, or wither away minister, , took over. No intel- in exile. They were a colorful lot, the jour- lectualism here, simply ruthless repression nalists writing in a Damon Runyon style of and increasing authoritarianism. Black ribald slang and sometimes affect- voices were silenced as the ANC, its lead- ing a pseudo-American accent gleaned from ers imprisoned or exiled, tried to muster the movies. Only some years later did a spirit the resources to mount a guerrilla war of anti-Americanism creep into the black against Africa’s most powerful military community, as the Soviets began training and establishment. The price of gold climbed aiding the exiled ANC’s guerrilla fighters. in international markets and South Africa I became political correspondent of the prospered, by political disaster and eco- Rand Daily Mail in 1961, and for the next nomic windfall, it was said. The country few years sat in the press gallery of the all- entered a triumphalist phase, soon reflect- white Parliament in listening to ed in the architecture of its cities. Real sky- Verwoerd expound on the philosophy of scrapers arose, 20, 30, 50 floors high, apartheid in two-hour marathons. It was an palaces of chrome and glass and conspicu- eerie experience. He had been a professor of ous affluence. A Dallas on the African applied psychology, trained in Germany dur- veldt. The centerpiece, the headquarters

74 WQ Spring 1999 of a bank, was a towering glass creation of the sparkling diamond palace found this designed by a New York architect in the tacky strip obscenely mirrored in their glass. shape of a diamond. Since the business community at that time Yet, as always, the reality of the city’s het- was trying to present itself to overseas critics erogeneous character refused to disappear. as an agent of reform, it could hardly send for The new extravaganza was located on a the removal squads. The best it could do was racial boundary called Diagonal Street, and present the baffled shop owners with gifts of across the road stood a row of decrepit two- free paint, but to little avail. The heteroge- story buildings officially licensed as “black neous reality of South Africa had triumphed shops” selling used clothes, cheap cuts of against the odds, as it has continued to do. meat, and the herbal medicines that African It is these images that I hold in my mind healers prescribe. To their horror, the owners as I listen to the protestations that “nothing

Taking over as prime minister in 1966, John Vorster inaugurated a grim new era of apartheid.

South Africa 75 New customers enjoy the shopping in Johannesburg’s upscale Sandton neighborhood.

has changed.” For today the city has fair amount of white emigration, a flight changed again, more radically than ever spurred by a postapartheid rise in the before. Today Johannesburg has aban- crime rate and a perceived loss of career doned its pretensions to being a Dallas or a opportunities because of the government’s Minneapolis. It has become an African affirmative action policies. No official fig- city, a huge Nairobi, with blacks thronging ures are available, but one educated guess its streets, taking over its shops, moving puts the number of white emigrants at per- into its apartments, and giving the whole a haps 75,000 since 1994. Not significant less glitzy, more Third World aspect. Black overall, but it has meant a loss of valuable consumers now account for more than 90 skills in professional sectors such as medi- percent of central city trade. Hillbrow, a cine, law, and the engineering sciences. high-rise apartment quarter that was once Inward and upward. As black South the residential heartland of young white Africans have moved in from the town- Johannesburg and the center of the city’s ships, they have moved up, enjoying a new nightlife, is now overwhelmingly black. social mobility undreamed of before, into From this core, blacks have spread out- the boardrooms of big companies such as ward into suburbia, to Yeoville and the mining giant Anglo American Brixton, to Mayfair and Vrededorp, and Corporation; into companies of their own, even into the most affluent suburbs, such as the highly successful Kagiso Media Houghton and Sandton. The demograph- Limited; and, not surprisingly, into com- ic tide has swept in, and with poetic justice manding positions in government depart- Soweto has taken over the city from which ments and parastatal corporations such as it was once expelled. Eskom, the national electricity supplier, and Transnet, the umbrella body control- s the tide flows, many whites are ling the national transportation network. withdrawing deeper into subur- Blacks are occupying middle-management A bia, their security walls rising and junior management positions, doing ever higher, office blocks and all-purpose supervision and strategic planning and a shopping centers following them to make host of other jobs that were closed to them it increasingly unnecessary ever to enter before. They are driving Mercedes-Benzes the city center. To that extent, a residual and BMWs and moving into big homes apartheid persists. There has also been a and in every way emulating the nouveau

76 WQ Spring 1999 riche lifestyles of the white moneyed elite the country is losing 70,000 jobs a year. that preceded them. Their children now There are seven million people living in go to the same suburban schools, play on sprawling squatter camps, South Africa’s the same sports teams, and go to the same favelas, on the fringes of the cities, and the cafes and cinemas and rock concerts as the millions of rural poor are still as destitute white kids. To that extent, an incipient as ever. But even for them, there have rainbow nation is taking shape. been some significant improvements. In What is happening, of course, is that a 1984, a comprehensive study of poverty in new class restratification is taking place, South Africa produced the appalling statis- overlaying the old distinctions based pure- tic that the average rural black South ly on race. A multiracial middle class is African woman had to walk eight miles emerging, growing socially more distant every day of her life to fetch water and fire- from the predominantly black working wood. Today, after five years of ANC rule, class and the huge underclass. A recent three million of those rural dwellers have survey conducted for the advertising indus- ready access to tap water and nearly two try showed that 43 percent of people in the million have electricity in their shacks. upper-income bracket were now black, They may still be desperately poor, but for and predicted that in five years’ time those two million the quality of life has blacks would be a majority. At the same been transformed in a fundamental way. time, white affluence is shrinking, some And then there is education, formerly working-class whites are joining the big segregated and hopelessly unequal for black trade unions, and a sprinkling of blacks, especially in the rural areas. It is white beggars are appearing on the streets. free and compulsory for all today, and For the first time since the Great though this has been accomplished amid Depression, poor-whiteism, the searing great confusion and blown budgets, every experience that hit the poorly educated school in the country is now integrated, white Afrikaner community particularly most with large black majorities. hard (and began the process of legally enforced job discrimination that culminat- y far the most important achieve- ed in apartheid) has shown its face again. ment, though, has been on the It is in this new class formation that the Bpolitical front: the enfranchise- seeds of discontent lie. It is not that noth- ment of the black majority and the ing has changed, but that things have not entrenchment of a democratic constitution. changed for enough people. The gap Sitting today in the press gallery where once between the new multiracial middle class I spent all those hours listening to Hendrik and the huge underclass is as wide as the Verwoerd drone out his crazy fantasies of old one between white and black, and it is “separate freedoms,” I sometimes get the growing wider. The trouble with this is the feeling that what is before me now cannot jealousy it arouses. Why should some possibly be real. The change is too great. blacks prosper so conspicuously while oth- The building and furnishings, even the pro- ers continue to languish in poverty? What cedural rituals, are still the same, and the happened to African socialism and the fel- same old ghosts still stalk the corridors and lowship of the oppressed? haunt my head. But where before there Unemployment is estimated variously at were serried ranks of white males, all alike in 25 to 45 percent, depending on whether their dark suits and closed faces and immov- one counts informal sector activities, and able ideas—except for the solitary woman,

With poetic justice, Soweto has taken over the city from which it was once expelled.

South Africa 77 the brave and combative liberal, Mrs. Helen times cheer, clap, or even sing. There has Suzman—today the whole of South Africa’s even been a fistfight on the floor of the multihued population is represented. Assembly—not, as it happens, involving A system of proportional representa- the new African lawmakers, but between tion with no minimum cutoff line has two white Afrikaners, one representing the meant that seven political parties are new regime and the other the old. At represented. In a National Assembly of moments of special enthusiasm, some of 400 members the ANC alliance holds the women are liable to break into ulula- 252 seats, having won 63 percent of the tion. When Mandela was first installed in national vote in 1994. (It also dominates his seat of power, an imbongi, or praise the Senate, Parliament’s upper house.) singer, was in attendance, clad in skins and Next in line is the party of the old beads to prance and chant the new presi- regime, the New National Party, with 82 dent’s history and virtues. Here, certainly, members, followed by Chief Mango- is a rainbow legislature. suthu Buthelezi’s Zulu-based Inkatha The change of content is even more strik- Freedom Party with 43. The remaining ing than the visual picture. In the old parties have fewer than 10 seats each: Assembly the white men, every one a self- the far-rightist Afrikaner Freedom Front, appointed amateur ethnologist, would talk the Democratic Party, the black militant endlessly about the black South Africans Pan-Africanist Congress, and the tiny who were not present—what they were like, African Christian Democratic Party. how they thought, what their real aspira- tions were, how they were different in their he chamber presents a kaleido- wants and ways. Now the black people are scopic picture of ethnic and sar- there to speak for themselves with a riveting Ttorial variety: colorful saris, flow- authenticity. The old sense of unreality that ing African gowns, long white Muslim used at times to overwhelm me has gone. robes, gaudy head scarves, and of course With that has come a new openness, for the dark suits. One-third of the members what has happened is much more than just are women, including the sari-clad speaker the abandoning of apartheid and the and her deputy. The mood is much less enfranchising of the black majority. It has inhibited: the honorable members some- also been a change from authoritarianism

Voting for a new South Africa in April 1994, the country’s first free democratic election

78 WQ Spring 1999 to democracy to a degree unique in The Assembly chamber presents Africa and equaled a kaleidoscopic picture of in only a handful of developed coun- ethnic and sartorial variety: colorful tries. The new Parliament gives saris, flowing African gowns, long expression to one of the most liberal white Muslim robes, gaudy head constitutions in the world, with an scarves, and of course the dark suits. entrenched Bill of Rights guarantee- ing all the funda- mental human rights, including the right to ecution; the effect was a form of self-cen- life, liberty, and freedom of expression. The sorship imposed by the journalists them- result has been some of the most progres- selves. The worst of these laws effective- sive decision making in the world, includ- ly silenced the authentic black political ing the prohibition of the death penalty and opposition by prohibiting the publica- legalization of abortion. tion of any information about it—except The meetings of Parliament and its for the damning statements issued by the committees are open to the public and government itself—or the quoting of the news media. Analyzing South African anything said by opposition leaders. politics used to require divining skills sim- Some newspapers, particularly the Rand ilar to those of Soviet-era Kremlinologists. Daily Mail, which was internationally By contrast, today’s ministers are highly acclaimed for its courage at the time, accessible, both formally and informally. tried hard to negotiate this minefield and A year after Mandela’s installation, my present a more balanced picture to the wife and I happened to be vacationing in public, but it was a hazardous business. Cape Town. As we returned from the During my own four-year editorship of beach one day, she remarked that she had the paper during the 1970s, I was in never been on the grounds of Tuynhuys, court six times. the gracious old Dutch-gabled presiden- tial office building alongside Parliament. hat was particularly galling in Impulsively, and as something of a test, I those years was that, while suggested we knock on the door and ask Wsome newspapers did their to see the president’s media spokesman, a best to expose the injustices of apartheid, long-standing friend. Not only did the the national public broadcaster, the South spokesman invite us in to look around, African Broadcasting Corporation but we were shown into the president’s (SABC), became the most blatant propa- office and chatted with senior aides, still gandist of the regime and its odious ideol- dressed in our beach clothes. ogy. It was initially modeled on Britain’s As a journalist, I have found the open- BBC, but soon after the National Party ness of the government and the commit- came to power it subverted the SABC’s ment to media freedom the most liberat- independence. The party packed the ing and encouraging features of the new board of directors with political appoint- regime. Not that there were censors in ees, who in turn filled all key editorial posi- our newsrooms under apartheid. The tions with ideologically reliable appa- control system was more insidious than ratchiks. No journalist who was not a true that. There were 120 pieces of legisla- believer could hope to work there. No crit- tion that one way or another restricted ical item ever made it on the air. what could be published on pain of pros- Moreover, no other broadcaster was per-

South Africa 79 chief executive, and the The one conspicuous failure heads of both radio and tele- during the Mandela years has vision news are black. At the same time, to prevent been in bringing about eco- another political hijacking of the airwaves, the SABC’s nomic revolution. monopoly of broadcasting has been ended. South Africa now has 16 public, 15 commercial, and 82 mitted to operate, giving the SABC a community radio stations, and three televi- monopoly in both radio and television. sion broadcasters putting six channels on the air. t is difficult to exaggerate the im- It has to be said, though, that there pact of this systematic brainwashing needs to be greater tolerance of the free- Ion white attitudes over three dec- doms the new constitution guarantees. ades following the 1960 banning of the Perhaps through a sense of insecurity, ANC and other black political organiza- many in the new regime are hypersensi- tions. To illustrate the point, a 1982 tive to criticism and quick to lash out opinion survey showed that 80 percent of with intemperate attacks, often aimed at whites believed the government line that the media. Although this has not communism, not black discontent, was reached the level of overt threats, there the greatest threat to South Africa’s is a worrying tendency to equate criti- future; 81 per cent of whites supported cism with racism and to imply that black cross-border military attacks on ANC journalists have a duty to support the bases in neighboring countries; and a new regime. At the same time some of staggering 71 percent believed that the new black news directors at the South African blacks were basically con- SABC are too close to the ANC leader- tent and had no reason to try to over- ship for comfort, raising the concern that throw the apartheid regime. The prevail- as the heat of campaigning mounts in ing white view, instilled by years of man- this election year, we may see the new aged news reporting, was that South commitment to editorial independence Africa was not facing a domestic threat begin to waver. But even if it does, at but an external one, a “total onslaught” least the public broadcaster won’t be the directed from the Soviet Union. To only voice on air. The democratization detoxify such a group mindset obviously of the airwaves has gone too far for South requires a transformation of the media Africa ever again to be without alterna- that helped create it. tive voices. That process has begun. Today the media The one conspicuous failure during the scene is substantially changed. The 120 laws Mandela years has been in bringing are dead letters. In their place is a near- about economic revolution. Fulfilling equivalent of the American First Amend- the government’s pledge to improve the ment: a constitutional clause guaranteeing quality of life for South Africa’s people— freedom of speech and a free press. Whereas to create jobs for the unemployed, to in the past all of the country’s newspapers build a million houses in five years for were white owned, today one of the four big the seven million homeless, to provide publishing companies is black controlled, health care for all and education for and four major dailies and two weeklies every child, to bring clean water and have black editors. The greatest change, electricity and telephones to the rural however, has been in broadcasting. The poor—requires one thing above all. SABC today has a multiracial board of direc- Growth. To stop unemployment from tors with a black chairman. It has a black becoming exponentially worse, simply to

80 WQ Spring 1999 stay in the same place, the country needs mid-1998. A billion dollars left the country an average growth rate of five percent a in the third quarter of that year, while cur- year for several years, a pace not seen for rency speculators attacked South Africa’s more than two decades. currency, the rand. Under the direction of a Reserve Bank Part of the economic problem is struc- governor, Chris Stals, inherited from the tural, stemming from the socioeconomic old regime, South Africa has followed an distortions caused by apartheid and aggra- excessively conservative monetary policy vated by the exigencies of the global free that has made reducing inflation and market. It is no easy task trying to trans- defending the currency the top priori- form a sophisticated economy shaped to ties, not growth and jobs. High interest provide a First World lifestyle for five mil- rates, which reached an unprecedented lion whites to one supplying 40 million 25.5 percent last October, have cut infla- South Africans with the basic necessities of tion from 22 perecent in the late 1980s life—and to do that without shattering the to seven percent at the end of last year. country’s entrepreneurial and skills capac- But coupled with labor inflexibility (the ity by triggering a white exodus. There is Labor Relations Act makes it difficult to an enormous financial burden involved in

With unemployment widespread, creating jobs will be a top post-Mandela priority.

fire incompetent workers) and a notori- advancing the black population, and, ously high crime rate, steep interest rates because of the income gap, only a small have deterred risk investment, particu- number of taxpayers bear this burden. Five larly direct foreign investment, and percent of South Africans contribute 80 brought growth to a standstill. percent of the tax revenue. But it is true, too, that the country did little in the way of he high interest rates have advance “think-tanking” about the eco- attracted foreign investment, but nomic aspects of the triple revolution it is T this is speculative, easy-come- now embroiled in. Economic issues were easy-go money. It left South Africa vulner- hardly debated at the great all-party able to the wave of nervousness about Negotiating Council that drafted the emerging markets that swept the world in country’s post-apartheid constitution. They

South Africa 81 were eclipsed by the huge drama of black leaving Zambia with an enormous debt to enfranchisement. service from depleted copper earnings. It Moreover, the country’s politicians are not has never recovered. Mandela telephoned well equipped intellectually to deal with the me after reading the article. “Come and economic revolution. Even as the ANC was have lunch with me,” he said. “I want to legalized in 1990, its ideological universe discuss this matter with you.” collapsed. Although there was great variation in the degree of its members’ commitment e lunched and talked in his to socialism, there is no doubt that the fall of Soweto home. It was evident communism and the discrediting of socialist Whe understood little about economics generally left the ANC in an ide- economics, but he told me he wanted to ological vacuum. This has made the eco- study the matter further. Today the nation- nomic transition doubly difficult for it. Nor alization pledge is dead and buried. was there help to be had from the New Instead, the government has adopted from National Party, which for the first two years Germany the concept of a social market formed a government of national unity with economy which is embodied in a catch-all the ANC. It, too, had no coherent vision of growth, employment, and redistribution how the economy should be reformed; for (GEAR) policy. The key financial minis- years it had run a seige economy designed ters and their departmental heads have chiefly to survive international sanctions, shown themselves to be fast learners. They and it had a history of massive intervention have moved, though perhaps too timidly, in the economy in order to maintain white to remove the exchange controls and trade dominance. barriers that were put in place during the Under the circumstances, the ANC has sanctions years, and to negotiate new trade shown a commendable pragmatism. The agreements. This has opened the way for only economic policy it had when it came to South Africa to enter the global market, power was a pledge contained in its but it has also exposed the country’s soft , drafted at a “congress of underbelly—its inflexible, poorly skilled, the people” in 1955, to nationalize key sec- and underproductive labor market. tors of the economy. “The national wealth Through all the complexities of the eco- of our country...shall be restored to the nomic revolution, one conclusion seems people,” the charter read. “The mineral self-evident: to succeed in the global mar- wealth beneath the soil, the banks, and ketplace and at the same time reduce the monopoly industry shall be transferred to burgeoning unemployment problem, the the ownership of the people as a whole. All government’s logical course would be to other industries and trade shall be con- emulate the newly industrialized countries trolled to assist the well-being of the people.” of and follow a low wage- The charter also pledged that “all the land high employment policy. That would [shall be] redivided amongst those who work increase competitiveness and encourage it, to banish famine and land hunger.” direct foreign investment by manufacturers At the time of Mandela’s release from seeking access to the huge African conti- prison in 1990, the Freedom Charter was nental market. But for a liberation move- still holy writ, and soon after he came ment that has pledged to free its people from home Mandela recommitted himself to the gross inequalities of apartheid deliber- the nationalization pledge. I wrote an arti- ately to hold down black working-class cle at the time criticizing his statement wages while allowing the rich white entre- and pointing out that the nationalization preneurial class to grow richer is politically of Zambia’s copper mines in 1974 had unthinkable. It is also politically impracti- crippled that desperate country’s economy. cal, for the labor unions are too strong and President had borrowed the ANC is bonded in a Siamese-twin rela- heavily to compensate the mining compa- tionship with them. Indeed, it is in a tripar- nies, after which the copper price crashed, tite alliance of long standing with the labor

82 WQ Spring 1999 Memories of apartheid: a Soweto scene from 1980

movement, as embodied in the Congress of other Asian economies triggered a flight of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and investment capital from all emerging mar- the South African Communist Party. While kets, South Africa suffered a triple wham- the Communist Party is small, Cosatu is by my: the gold price fell, layoffs increased, far the best-organized and most muscular and speculative raids on the rand sent it political organization in the country. It is plummeting 26 percent in two months. generally reckoned to be powerful enough Both Cosatu and the Communist Party to block any strategy of economic develop- began calling loudly for the scrapping of ment that would hurt the interests of orga- GEAR, but the government held its nized workers. Certainly the ANC would ground. At Cosatu’s national congress in hate to see Cosatu break away from the June, both Mandela and his heir apparent, alliance and turn itself into a socialist work- Deputy President Mbeki, chided the ers party, for it could quickly become a for- unionists for their disloyalty. “Why do we midable challenger for power. still call each other comrade?” Mbeki asked pointedly, while Mandela warned s the winds of economic change that public attacks on ANC policy by other blew more icily through the alliance members could have serious A Southern Hemisphere in the implications. “GEAR is the fundamental winter of 1998, when first Japan and then policy of the ANC,” he declared, wagging

South Africa 83 Archbishop Desmond Tutu opens the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its final report implicated not only the white regime but ANC members, Inkatha leader Buthelezi, and others in human rights violations.

a finger at his audience. “We are not going Their aspiring candidates would have to be to change it because of your pressure.” nominated by their local ANC branches, More significantly still, the ANC leaders meaning they would have to demonstrate told Cosatu members they would not get a their comradely fidelity or they would be out. block allocation of seats on the ANC ticket That implicit threat stated, Mbeki went on to in the 1999 election, as they did in 1994. tell the unionists bluntly that the government

84 WQ Spring 1999 would not accede to If there is ever to be a true spirit of their demands for a moratorium on lay- national unity among South offs, and indeed in- tended to amend the Africa’s diverse racial groups, then rigid Labor Relations Act to allow for special there must first be a great act of low youth wages and to make it easier for reconciliation between the victims employers to dismiss some workers. Un- of oppression and the perpetrators. popular stuff, but the chastened unions accepted it. “ANC Tells Cosatu To Jump In Lake,” ran one front-page headline after indefinite detention without trial and dur- the congress. An exaggeration, certainly, but ing which they raided and tortured and also an acknowledgment that the govern- killed with relish. They did so in the indoc- ment had shown political courage in facing trinated belief that they were fighting a holy up to a difficult issue. war for volk and fatherland against the evil forces of communist terrorism. Then sud- ncouraging though that was, it is denly their political leaders did a deal with still unclear whether South Africa these supposedly heinous enemies, who in Eis capable of weathering the a few short years became their new bosses— storms of globalization and domestic eco- leaving many of the police bewildered, dis- nomic transformation. To succeed, it must illusioned, and in many cases bitterly angry. attract substantially more direct foreign Some have quit the force, going into the investment, and a major deterrent here is one form of activity they know best, which South Africa’s wretched crime rate. is organized crime. Others are simply dispir- Although the tales of hijackings, robbery, ited and unmotivated. and rape have become more lurid in the At the same time, the ending of isolation retelling abroad, the crime rate is bad and and of sanctions has seen the country’s bor- foreign corporations are reluctant to put ders open and a flood of new arrivals enter. their personnel at risk. South Africa has Only half a dozen airlines used to fly into the always been a violent place. But whereas in pariah state; now scores land daily from all the past the worst violence was largely con- parts of Latin America, Asia, the Indian sub- fined to the black ghettos and ignored by the continent, Europe, North America, and public media, now it has spread into the other parts of Africa. They bring with them central city areas and into suburbia, hitting the drug trade and international drug syndi- both the white population and the front cates, which were quick to spot the opportu- pages. There is no doubt, too, that it has nities presented by a country with a weak- worsened as it has widened. ened law enforcement system. Drugs and There are many reasons for this, the most cars and guns. There is a brisk trade in stolen critical being the collapse of effective polic- vehicles smuggled across South Africa’s ing. For generations, the South African porous borders into corrupt and poverty- police were the frontline troops in the stricken countries to the north, where they enforcement of the laws of segregation and are exchanged for drugs that are brought back oppression. In the final years of turbulence, to be sold or re-exported. And there is a pro- through the 1980s, the conflict between liferation of guns in a region that has seen police and protesters escalated into some- four long guerrilla wars over the past 30 years. thing close to a civil war, during which the Getting on top of the crime wave requires police were given extraordinary powers of rebuilding the police force and establishing

South Africa 85 a bond of trust between it and the public— tion. Thus, the archbishop’s commission a bond that has never before existed in became a giant public confessional. In three South Africa, for the police have always years it investigated 31,000 cases of human been seen as the people’s oppressors. It will rights abuses during the apartheid era, and be a slow and painstaking task, but without last October it came up with a report of one it there will be no end to the crime, and million words. without controlling the crime there will be South Africans have seen on their televi- no economic revolution—and without that sion screens a burly security police torturer, there will be no rainbow future. Captain Jeffrey Benzien, squat on the back of a black victim lying facedown on the floor f there is ever to be a true spirit of and demonstrate how he pulled a wet bag national unity among South Africa’s over the man’s head to suffocate him to the Idiverse racial groups, then there must edge of death. They have heard others testi- first be a great act of reconciliation between fy how they “tubed” political prisoners, the victims of oppression and the perpetra- pulling a strip of rubber tubing over the pris- tors. And reconciliation, all the great reli- oner’s nose and mouth and sometimes keep- gions tell us, can come about only if there is ing it there too long, so that the victim died.

Benzien testifies about torture before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

first confession and atonement. Hence the When the victims suddenly voided their establishment of a remarkable institution bladders, one torturer explained, “then you called the Truth and Reconciliation knew they had gone to another place.” They Commission, headed by that prince of com- have heard officers in a special chemical passion, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. You warfare unit explain how they developed cannot have Nuremburg trials after a nego- special poisons that could be sprinkled on tiated settlement, with executions and the clothing of black leaders, and how they imprisonment of the guilty, and so South tried to develop a pill that would render Africa settled for a kind of deal—the black women infertile and so cut the black exchange of truth for amnesty. Those who birthrate. They even considered developing committed atrocities could make their con- a drug that would damage Mandela’s brain fessions and be indemnified from prosecu- and render him mentally ineffectual before

86 WQ Spring 1999 his release from his futile bid to stave prison. Diplomats call it off black majority rule The cascade of hor- the WHAM ques- in that neighboring ror has been numb- country. De Kock per- ing. As , a tion—What fected his brutal prize-winning Afri- methods fighting kaner poet who head- happens after guerrillas in Namibia ed SABC Radio’s and Angola, returning reporting team cover- Mandela? in 1985 to Pretoria, ing the Truth Com- where he was given mission, wrote last command of a special year, “Week after week; voice after voice; unit code-named C-10. Its task was to under- account after account. It is like travelling on take covert operations against “enemies of a rainy night behind a huge truck—images the state,” meaning supporters of the ANC. of devastation breaking in sheets on the It was there that De Kock’s unique talent for windscreen.” violence earned him the nickname “Prime After 20 years of cover-up, South Africans Evil.” Over the next eight years he and his have learned at last who killed the Black unit, consisting largely of turned ANC guer- Consciousness leader, ; how his rillas called askaris, killed scores of people; head was bashed against a prison cell wall, De Kock told the court he didn’t really know causing fatal damage to his brain. And how how many. Senior police officers around the Matthew Goniwe, a young activist of the country would telephone him and give him 1980s who was a friend of mine, one of the the names of people they wanted “taken brightest and most charming young people I out.” Some of the killings were wantonly have ever known, was abducted on a lonely savage. Once De Kock cleaved a victim’s road one night in 1985 along with three head open with a garden spade. friends, all of them dragged into the bushes, Members of the unit usually disposed of beaten unconscious, stabbed to death, their bodies by wrapping them around a stick of bodies and faces mutilated and burned to dynamite and blowing them to smithereens. conceal their identities. One of Matthew’s They mailed poisons and booby-trapped hands was cut off and kept in a bottle of for- bombs hidden in pens, manuscripts, tape malin to terrify black political prisoners dur- recorders, and radios to exiles living in ing interrogation. “What kind of person, what Swaziland, Tanzania, and Zambia. They kind of human being,” asks Krog, “keeps blew up the headquarters of the South another’s hand in a fruit-jar on his desk? What African Council of Churches and the kind of hatred makes animals of people?” Congress of South African Trade Unions in But the most horrifying stories by far came Johannesburg, as well as the ANC head- from a two-year court trial of the apartheid quarters in London. And they were reward- regime’s chief assassin, Colonel Eugene de ed by the authorities. De Kock became one Kock. A squarely built man with thick-lensed of the most highly decorated officers in the spectacles, De Kock was found guilty of mur- Force. dering 65 people and sentenced to 212 years’ imprisonment. He has applied for amnesty t is difficult to judge how this outpour- and has still to appear before the Truth ing has affected the South African pub- Commission’s special Amnesty Committee. Ilic. For some black people, it seems to He may yet go free. But his accounts of what have been cathartic to be able to tell their he did have burned themselves into the stories and to hear the confessions. For oth- pages of South African history. ers, it has been infuriating to see the guilty Now 48, De Kock has been in the killing get amnesty and walk free. Many whites business all his adult life. He began in the accuse the commission of being a witch 1960s, fighting in a South African police hunt and of stirring up hatreds that will make unit sent to to help in reconciliation impossible. Some have react-

South Africa 87 ed with fury and sent death threats to Tutu actually I am not sure what I am going to and the other commissioners. The New say,” he began. Then, turning to Tutu, he National Party threatened to take the com- said: “As a minister in the Dutch Reformed mission to court for bias. Yet others have tried Church for 20 years, as a chaplain in the to ignore it with a sullen withdrawal. But for Defense Force, I want to say to you we are a few, mainly white Afrikaners, there is a sorry. For what we have done wrong we ask deep sense of guilt and soul-searching, for the Lord for forgiveness.” He ended in a theirs was the ruling group and these con- whisper, choked by tears. Tutu got up, put fessing monsters are their own people. Antjie his arm around the distraught minister, and Krog, the Afrikaner poet, speaks for them. for an emotion-charged moment the two “Some of us may deny it,” Krog said at an men stood there hugging each other as the event marking the publication of her book, congregation rose to its feet and applauded. Country of My Skull, last July, “but deep Perhaps this was a beginning. down Afrikaners know the truth. We are embarrassed, we are deeply ashamed and outh African diplomats call it the isolated in our clumsy, lonely attempts to WHAM question—What happens deal with our guilt.” Saying the Truth Safter Mandela? The question itself, Commission had shattered the self-image of and the frequency with which it is asked, Afrikaners, she added: “We now know exact- echo the old doomsday expectations, a feel- ly what we as Afrikaners are. A people capa- ing that somehow the new South Africa is ble of indescribable evil. But also a people of too good to be true, that it happened only an honesty to walk the road of this country because of one magic man, and that without and this continent.” him it will surely return to its predestined A few weeks later a minister of the Dutch road to disaster. Reformed Church, Dr. Ockie Rauben- On the contrary, South Africa is about to heimer, invited Tutu in his capacity as chair- undergo the most predictable and orderly man of the Truth Commission to preach in succession outside British royalty, and cer- Raubenheimer’s suburban Johannesburg tainly one unique in Africa, with the ANC church. It was a significant invitation: the certain to win the June elections over- Dutch Reformed Church, the main whelmingly and 56-year-old denomination of the Afrikaner community, long since anointed to succeed Mandela. As was a pillar of support for the apartheid sys- deputy president, Mbeki has effectively been tem, earning for itself the sobriquet of “the running the country for the past two years, National Party at prayer.” Raubenheimer, with Mandela increasingly in the role of con- moreover, was a chaplain in the Defense stitutional monarch. Moreover, with a mas- Force and thus an integral part of the ter’s degree in economics from the Univer- regime’s repressive machinery, while Tutu sity of Sussex, he is better qualified than was a symbol of enmity to Afrikaners Mandela to deal with the most pressing throughout the apartheid years. Now the issues now facing South Africa. Nor will the two were together before a congregation of June election cause any significant shifts. Afrikaner notables. The most comprehensive opinion poll in the The service began cautiously enough, first quarter of 1999 indicated that ANC sup- with Raubenheimer speaking of the port was holding steady at 54 percent, just Afrikaners’ role in the past, saying there was nine points down from its 1994 level, which much to be proud of but there had also been is impressive given the level of political some mistakes. But after Tutu’s sermon, in excitement during that “liberation” election. which the little archbishop referred to the The only real change is likely to be a shake- “evil deeds” of the past and the need for a up among the opposition parties, with both leader to step forward and help the people the holdovers from the apartheid era, the come to terms with what had been done, New National Party and the Inkatha Raubenheimer unexpectedly stepped for- Freedom Party, now in free fall: the NNP ward. “I am not scheduled to speak now and down by more than half to a miserable nine

88 WQ Spring 1999 A ceremonial event in Durban before the end of apartheid saw Inkatha leader (left) in good spirits. Long a political rival of the ANC, Buthelezi may win a top post in the next government.

percent support in the poll, and Inkatha like- haunt Mbeki. The two men are also sharply wise down, from over 10 percent to five per- different, in stature and in style. While cent. Only the Democratic Party has shown Mandela is tall and regal, Mbeki is a small growth, from just under 2 percent to six per- man. He also lacks Mandela’s natural cent, but this is mainly white support that has charisma. Although affable in company and shifted from the NNP and has little rele- very good in one-to-one situations, he is vance to the predominantly black electoral uncomfortable in crowds and does not pro- power center. So, for the next five years at ject well before them. least, Mbeki will rule from an unassailable support base. beki is in truth an enigma. He is Two other factors also set this succession polished, urbane, and highly apart from the general African pattern. One M able. He is a consummate is Mandela’s decision to retire after only one politician who has spent his whole life in the term as president, in a continent where ANC since joining its Youth League at the politicians tend to cling to power for life or age of 14, and who served the organization’s until it is wrested from them in a coup. The president-in-exile, , as chief other is that several of Mandela’s ministers, aide, troubleshooter, and ambassador-at- all old comrades, have followed suit and large. He is an experienced diplomat who announced that they too will not be avail- knows the ways of the world and is at ease in able for re-election, thus giving Mbeki a the company of its major leaders. He is a freer hand to choose his own team. These man of superior intelligence with a fine are positive indicators of an intrinsic democ- British education. He is cultured and highly ratic culture lacking elsewhere in Africa. literate, an authority on Shakespeare and on Of course, stepping into the shoes of such the poetry of Yeats, which he often quotes. a moral colossus is not a role to be envied. He writes his own speeches, some of which Comparisons are inevitable and bound to have a literary elegance, as when he berated

South Africa 89 Heir-apparent Thabo Mbeki, currently deputy president, shares the spotlight with Mandela.

Africa’s power-hungry dictators last August of parliamentary debates, Mbeki avoids for their greed and corruption and appealed verbal jousting and never shows anger. He for an “African Renaissance” to restore the prefers to operate behind the scenes, continent’s dignity and self-respect. “The where he is an acknowledged master of the thieves and their accomplices,” he said, “the strategic move who skillfully sidelined all givers of the bribes and the recipients are as competitors for the position he now holds. African as you and I. We are the corrupter In all this, Mbeki’s style and personality and the harlot who act together to demean differ markedly from Mandela’s. Where our continent and ourselves.” Mandela’s leadership style is transparent But despite all this ability, there is some- and collegial, Mbeki’s is likely to be less where within Mbeki a hint of insecurity. open, resembling the upper levels of a More than any other ANC leader, he has business where a small coterie of leaders shown a hypersensitivity to criticism and make decisions which they expect those been particularly touchy in his dealings below them to obey. The decision making with the media. It has also become a mat- is also likely to be more strategically ter of concern among many analysts that focused. he has surrounded himself with aides and officials who are less than impressive, peo- ome analysts believe the difference ple whose main attribute appears to be between the two men stems from their personal loyalty to him. “Not for Stheir different experiences during Mbeki,” wrote political scientist Robert the long years of struggle against apartheid. Shrire of Cape Town University in a recent Indeed, there are three different sets of expe- article, “the Kennedy and Roosevelt style rience that have produced three markedly of leadership where strong and indepen- different political cultures within the ANC. dent personalities are brought into the They do not always mesh comfortably. presidential team.” Mbeki’s team is com- There are those who served long sentences posed of courtiers rather than advisers. together on , the political Coupled with this is a dislike of face-to- prison offshore near Cape Town, a harsh face conflict. Even in the parry-and-thrust experience that induced humility and

90 WQ Spring 1999 encouraged a strong sense of equality and strategic approach is to seek consensus for comradeship despite what are sometimes what he wants to do by neutralizing oppos- sharp ideological differences. Then there are ing factions through co-optation or isolation the “internals,” the activists of the black of their leading figures. So stand by for an townships and the trade unionists who offer of a deputy presidency to Chief formed a loose alliance called the United Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Zulu Democratic Front that took to the streets and nationalist , which confronted the apartheid regime’s security would help end the endemic black-on-black forces during the great black uprising of the violence that has ravaged KwaZulu/Natal 1980s. Because of the looseness of their province for nearly two decades; and for the alliance, they developed an elaborate system appointment of Sam Shilowa, general secre- of collective decision making and had a tary of Cosatu, as minister of labor, to open strong aversion to any cult of leadership or the way for more flexibility in labor policy. any one person having overriding authority. There will be more emphasis on discipline Third, there are the exiles, who lived a peripatetic and often precarious exis- tence scattered about the globe, many associated with the ANC’s efforts to wage Mbeki’s South Africa will a guerrilla war against the apartheid regime. It meant that being in the good probably be a little less graces of an individual leader could decide whether you were located in rela- open, a little less democ- tively comfortable circumstances, such ratic, than Mandela’s. as a posting in Europe or North America, or given an uncomfortable and even dan- But it is also likely to be gerous assignment somewhere in the African bush. So, individual loyalty more strongly focused became a primary consideration. More important still, the exiles were vulnerable on the critical issues fac- to infiltration by agents of the apartheid regime, and over time the devastating ing South Africa. successes of these spies engendered a paranoia within the ANC’s exiled leader- ship. It discouraged openness and led to a and conformity, and less tolerance of indis- more imperial kind of decision making that cretions and individuality. Expect, too, more emphasized obedience to rules and orders focus on socioeconomic transformation, less from the top as essential to survival. on racial reconciliation. Mbeki has, rightly Mandela, with his easy style of leadership, in my opinion, identified the main future comes from the prison experience; Mbeki, political threat to stability as more likely to with his touch of paranoia and his more come from the unfulfilled black masses than insider-oriented leadership style, comes from white right wing counterrevolutionar- from the exile group, having spent 30 of the ies, who were Mandela’s big worry. most formative years of his life abroad. But the key question is: Will, can, Man- dela’s successor fulfill his promise of creat- hat do these differences por- ing a rainbow nation? It is difficult enough tend? Mbeki’s South Africa to follow in the footsteps of a giant; to realize Wwill probably be a little less another’s dream seems even more unlikely. open, and to that extent less democratic, Except that this is really a collective dream, than Mandela’s. But it is also likely to be for the ANC has been committed to the more strongly focused on the critical issues principle of nonracialism since its formation facing South Africa, on the flagging growth 87 years ago. So the question really is: What, rate, on crime and unemployment. Mbeki’s after five years, is the status of the dream?

South Africa 91 Are the doomsayers right, or is it still on the government by force of arms. But the track? threat was defused when an attempted There can be no doubt that South Africa putsch in one of the tribal “homelands” col- today is still a country of great ethnic diversi- lapsed ignominiously. Mandela then met ty riven by social inequality and historical with the putative leader, former Defense resentments. There can be no doubt, too, Force chief general , and that the transition has encountered unex- persuaded him to campaign for his separatist pected obstacles, especially on the econom- cause by constitutional means instead. Since ic front, compounding old problems and then, Mandela’s reconciliatory approach and throwing up new ones. It is a dauntingly dif- the general moderation of the ANC’s poli- ficult place. But South Africa is also a coun- cies have reduced white fears, if not yet many try of great energy and enterprise, a regional whites’ complaints about the loss of prefer- superpower with enormous potential both ential treatment. Most Afrikaners have adapt- for itself and as a stabilizing force in the ed to the new South Africa with a surprising world’s most marginalized continent. I ease and speed, a fact reflected in the dra- believe the same fundamental dynamics matic decline in support for the New that drove it toward a negotiated settlement National Party. that the rest of the world thought impossible are still operating and will continue to pro- inally, with the experience of four pel it forward. years of secret talks and another First of all, the country is too economical- Ffour of formal negotiations leading ly integrated, its races too mutually interde- up to the end of the old order, this deeply pendent, for ethnic dismemberment ever to divided society has developed a culture of take place. It was this interdependence that negotiation that has made it a world leader defeated history’s most determined effort to in the art of conflict resolution. South enforce ethnic partition; if it had been even Africans have been called in as consultants remotely possible, half a century of apartheid in the conflicts of Northern Ireland, would have achieved it. Second, unlike most Rwanda, and Nigeria. At home, sophisticat- African countries, South Africa has no dom- ed consultative councils have been estab- inant ethnic group, which means there is no lished to resolve labor disputes and to for- political advantage to be had in whipping up mulate consensus policies on a range of tribal nationalisms. The Zulus are the largest issues. Negotiation and consensus seeking tribe, but even they number only one-sixth of have become the modus operandi of the the total population. Thus any political party ANC government, and Mbeki, who was the that defines itself in ethnic terms, as Inkatha first ANC exile leader to hold secret talks has done, runs the risk of taking itself out of with Afrikaner dissidents and the apartheid contention for national political power. Only regime’s secret service agents back in 1987, one of South Africa’s nine political parties is its prime practitioner. can be identified in ethnic terms, and that is In sum, I believe the signs point to a con- Buthelezi’s Inkatha. It has lost more than tinuation of South Africa’s miraculous half its support since 1994 and could even transformation from apartheid state to rain- lose control of its only regional powerbase, bow nation. There are still many problems the provincial government of KwaZulu- to be overcome, but ethnic conflict is not Natal, in this year’s elections. the fundamental one. Those posed by the The third and most important factor is the new global market are the most dangerous. decline of any prospect of a white counter- If South Africa fails, the cause will be the revolution. This was the most real, and defeat of its economic, not its political, rev- feared, danger at the time of the 1994 elec- olution. But looking back at the perils of tion, when right-wing Afrikaner extremists 1994, there can be no doubt that we are formed themselves into militia movements through the worst. And when you have that threatened to link up with the Afrikaner- escaped Armageddon, it is no time to led Defense and Police Forces and take over become a pessimist.

92 WQ Spring 1999